


Frozen

by postmodernsleaze



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Alternate Universe, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Female Characters, Illness, Romance, Sexual Inexperience, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-05 22:43:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1834906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postmodernsleaze/pseuds/postmodernsleaze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zoe watches the oak's leaves change and twirl inevitably down. A thousand little, stark reminders that winter will soon be upon them. It will be her fourth in captivity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frozen

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for an American Horror Story fic exchange over on LJ, it has just taken me a while to cross-post it here. This fic is AU, though I tried to subtly incorporate elements from canon here and there. I was heavily inspired by the song "Sweater Weather" by the Neighbourhood, along with winter images.

One hundred and one days after she was born, her mother planted an Oak Tree in the yard. The very thought of the great Fiona Goode venturing outside in the middle of winter - _naked_ \- with nothing but a shovel, a bucket full of blood and an Oak seedling still makes her snort, but Cordelia has assured her on more than one occasion that’s exactly how their mother had done it. She’d done it like she does everything else in her life: with pride and determination.

Atop the waste of her birth, the tiny seedling was planted and as it had nurtured her during those nine months, so did it nurture the tree. It grew at an almost alarming speed, quicker even than she did, its roots fattening and digging deep down into the earth as its branches reached up and up and up in an attempt to cradle the sun, the moon, _the stars_. 

Nowadays it stands tall, strong. Nowadays Zoe can hardly bear to look at it.

It’s like a mirror.

The Oak, like her, is rooted firmly in place. Immobile, trapped by cold, dense earth, exposed to the elements and the seasons. Zoe watches its leaves change - _she hates it when the leaves change_ \- and twirl and tumble inevitably down. A thousand little, stark reminders that winter will soon be upon them.

It will be her fourth in captivity.

 

 

“Jesus, will you stop slouching? The women in this family are known for our backbone; use yours.”

The knife and fork in her hands are cold, polished to perfection by a maid they don’t pay nearly as much as they could –as they _should_ \- but who sticks around, anyway, hovering ever close to the kitchen door just in case she’s called upon, which is often. There’s no pleasing her mother, after all, not really. The food is always _something_ but just right: too cold, too hot, too fatty, too dry. Zoe’s shoulders feel stiff, arched forward as they are, the delicate shape of her collarbones clearly visible through her nearly translucent skin, her elbows growing sore from resting on the grand table’s edge. 

“Why? It’s not like I need it.”

Across from her, Cordelia stills and looks up from her plate. Her fork trembles almost unnoticeably in her slender hand, but Zoe’s gotten good at watching –it’s all she ever does anymore- and catches the movement. A little flicker of emotion, nearly as telling as the visible way her sister swallows. Not food; a lump in her throat that their mother put there.

Zoe averts her eyes and turns them on the woman in question. Fiona’s all collected grace, her legs crossed elegantly under the table, regarding her with a slight tilt of her perfectly quaffed head, not a single blonde strand out of place. “I want to go outside.”

An almost exasperated roll of eyes, the corners of blood red lips pulling down.

“How many more times do I have to tell you before you finally learn? You can’t.”

“Yes, I can,” she bites back through clenched teeth, because she hasn’t had anything to lose in years now.

“Not with your… _affliction_.” Her mother has put down her fork, moves her hands in the air like she’s shaping the word with her fingers instead of her lips. She’s not meeting her cold gaze, rather looking down at the feast before them. Like her sister is.

It’s all an act; everything. The food, the silverware, the expensive cloth covering the table. _Them_. 

“Bullshit. I’ve told you, I feel _fine_.”

“Well, you’re not!” 

Zoe doesn’t even flinch at Fiona’s sudden outburst, just presses her lips together and waits for her mother to collect herself again. Tap a pack of cigarettes on the table and worm a long, boney finger inside. Light up. Exhale. Smoke as white as her porcelain complexion, as fragile and constant as her dreams of getting out.

“The good doctor will be here for you tomorrow. We’ll see about taking a walk after his visit.”

“In town?”

Brown eyes narrow slightly. Her sister’s are cast heavenwards and to the side, as if by doing so she can avoid the conversation as well as their tense body language. “The property is more than big enough.”

Zoe shakes her head and scoffs, makes sure to make as much noise as possible as she pushes her chair away from the table and stands up.

“You can’t keep me here forever.” If she’s said the words once, she’s said them a thousand times. “Your madness isn’t mine.”

 

 

That evening, she watches her mother through the crack in her bedroom door. The older woman is in her nightgown, a beautiful piece of clothing, black satin with intricate beading near the hem and neckline because even in slumber she won’t settle for anything less than perfection. _Decadence_.

Her vanity table is aptly named and matches the way Fiona feels about her appearance perfectly. Its marble surface is nearly littered with lotions, powders, makeup, ointments,… aids in her eternal quest for youth and beauty. Like Santa’s little helpers.

They can only work so many miracles, though, and the painstaking process of age catching up and digging its greedy claws in her mother’s flesh would be laughable, if it wasn’t so unbearably tragic. If the glimpses Zoe catches of her mother’s reflection in the mirror didn’t look like desperation, like something so unlike her mother at all.

For all her ridiculous claims to magic, she can’t seem to keep herself young.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall…” though her lips are curled up into a self-deprecating smile, she sounds tired. Her black nails –not unlike those of a panther or any other beautifully dangerous animal- push and pull at flesh that’s becoming weaker, all elasticity it may have once had having made way for deep lines and crow’s feet. The sagging skin near her throat almost seems to shiver, shake like a turkey’s, before she smoothes it back and away with both hands and meets her own eyes. Head on, unafraid.

“I’m the most beautiful of all.”

Zoe can taste the words in her mouth. The lie they tell.

 

 

The doctor comes and leaves again. He’s a spindly man, with glasses that remind Zoe of the glass containers jam is stored in and a hairline that has been steadily receding throughout the years, ebbing away never to be seen anywhere near his forehead again. He’s friendly enough, but he never says the words she wants to hear. He doesn’t make her better.

He doesn’t make her healthy enough for her mother to let her out of her golden cage.

She tells her sister about it one evening, when she returns home from work. Cordelia teaches almost 24/7. She teaches art at a local school by day and teaches Zoe everything else four evenings a week. Zoe wonders from time to time about Hank, about how they do it. How they keep a marriage alive that neither spouse is there to invest in. She doesn’t know much about love –how could she- but she’s always bitterly assumed it requires living for the other person, if only a little.

Hank lives for himself, for his work. Cordelia lives to keep her mother happy, and to keep her poor, little sister educated. Sane.

They live for _each other_ as much as the pair of black cats that run about the mansion do; when they’re not yowling and rutting mindlessly, they’re hissing and trying to claw each other’s yellow eyes out.

“I’m telling you, she’s paying him to make me believe I’m ill. I haven’t felt sick in over a month now.”

Cordelia looks up from the Art History book she’s reading, quietly reaches for her cup of herbal tea.

Zoe takes this as permission to continue.

“Please, you talk to her about me. I know you do. I’m _better_. I promise. I want to go out and see more than the same fucking woods over and over again! The same curtains, the same doors, the same furniture, the same rooms. She’s driving me up the walls. If this goes on much longer, before long I’ll be as crazy as she is!”

“Mother’s not crazy.”

They’ve had this conversation before. It’s always the same: Cordelia’s quiet defending of their mother’s madness and Zoe’s incredulousness. Her pointed looks. She’s giving her sister one right now.

“She thinks she’s a witch.”

Cordelia does that thing with her mouth that signals a mincing of her words. Careful consideration.

“Well, you can’t deny that she is very talented with herbs and plants,” she replies hesitantly, “and I can certainly imagine her flying around on a broom, cackling.” The smile she gives her is sweet, secretive. It reminds Zoe of her childhood, of hands in cookie jars and scraped knees, of forgetting to feed her goldfish. Of Cordelia placing a finger over her lips and not telling their mother about any of it.

Cordelia’s so patient with her. With both of them. It makes it hard to be angry at her about anything, but still…

“Don’t fucking joke about it. She already seems to think you believe all that crap.”

Cordelia sighs, turns back to her book, replies very quietly. “Maybe I do.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake!”

She slams the door hard on her way out, stomps the stairs all the way up to her room and hopes the sound rattles her mother’s teeth, makes Cordelia pinch the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes.

They don’t get it; she’s in and they’re out.

 

 

She dresses all in black, dons elaborate hats indoors and pulls a veil over them. Plays pretend. She’s going to attend a funeral. Her mother’s, her own. She walks slowly, glides over the freshly polished hardwood floors, the scent of pine and citrus invading her nose as she takes deer-like strides and lets her fingers trail over walls that have become as familiar to her as the sound of her own heartbeat. 

The portraits hang high, hang everywhere in the main living area, their subjects looking down their noses at her as she walks past. Her ancestors. “Great women of our clan,” as her mother always tells her wistfully. Witches.

Zoe feels like taking a knife to each and every canvas and ripping down.

Not a funeral; a collective burning at the stake.

 

 

She’s so lonely, it actually hurts. A nagging pain in her marrow and joints, a sharp tugging at the strings of her heart.

 

 

There’s a gramophone in the Mansion and Zoe uses it to play Chopin’s Nocturnes. All of them. Over and over and over again.

She lays on her bed, dangling one stocking-clad foot off the edge and staring up at her bedroom ceiling, trying to envision this illness that has supposedly taken hold of her. Today is a good day, but almost immediately after the doctor’s last visit she’d gotten sick again. Violently so. Throwing up all three of her meals and then some. She imagines what the virus looks like inside her body, her bloodstream. She imagines it caressing the inside of her veins with little tongues made of liquid fire, burning through her like the fireplace through wood. Quickly, without care or mercy.

She takes a bath. Cradles her bony knees to her chest and cries.

The water is freezing and the stylus waiting to be adjusted again by the time she gets out.

 

 

“It’s not right, she’s suffering!”

“What would you have me do, hm? Send her out there, to face all the _horrors_ of this world? Unprotected?”

“She’s six months shy of eighteen, mother!”

“She’s _afflicted_ , is what she is!”

“She’s _lonely_. She needs to go to school. To be with people her own age, not stuck inside these walls with— “

“Go ahead, Delia, with _me_. Say it.”

“…”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Voices through the walls.

 

 

Her mother’s taking an axe to her tree. It’s almost comical to see her, in her black dress that hugs her body like water and dangerously high heels, slightly wobbly on her bent legs as she swings it behind her head, hacks into the bark like the answer to life eternal awaits inside the tree’s core.

Zoe watches from her window on high, thinking about how supposedly the prostitutes in Paris used to walk through the Meat Packing district, the blood running through the streets coloring the soles of their heels the exact same shade of red her mother’s wearing.

When she’s chopped a considerable amount of bark away, has slashed and hacked at the stem, she wrenches a big chunk of wood loose and drops it in the bucket she’s brought for the occasion. Zoe’s heart aches and her fingers clench. 

 

 

He isn’t Kyle when she first meets him. That comes later. 

He’s the body guard.

 _The attack dog_.

“What am I supposed to do with him?” She eyes the boy from her seat on the large divan. Wary, as if any minute he’s going to sprout another head, another mop of curly blond hair. He has his hands clasped behind him, his back straight as an arrow, legs spread slightly apart. He looks absolutely immovable. Solid build, strong shoulders.

The kind of posture her mother loves. She can tell; she’s practically glowing as she turns her attention back on her.

“You’re supposed to let him follow you around. Protect you.”

“Follow me around where? The bathroom? The kitchen? To the edge of the Northern wood and back again?”

There’s a slight tilt to her mother’s chin as she swallows the retort Zoe just _knows_ she really wants to give to that, and manages a weak smile.

“To the edge of the Northern wood and back again… for now. Once you’ve seen the doctor and he approves… perhaps you may venture outside under his supervision.”

 _Under his supervision_ are three words she couldn’t care less about, because the only one that really matters has been uttered. _Outside_. She’ll be allowed outside.

She nearly springs up, unable to keep the excitement from showing on her face. Where her mother is as tough to crack as marble, she takes after her father. From what little she can still recall, he was always an open book, too. Right up until his pages closed forever, slammed violently shut. A bank robbing, a good man in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

Her mother calls it weakness. All it does is convince Zoe even more that her father didn’t die from a gunshot to the heart; he was already slowly being pressed to death, crushed under the weight of a woman like Fiona and all her desires and expectations.

It’s hard to live in someone else’s shadow, especially when said shadow reaches as far as her mother’s does. It’s hard to exist solely to keep a person happy.

“Come with me,” she tells the boy.

 

 

At first getting him to talk to her is like pulling teeth, which is more unfortunate for him than it is for her, really, because Zoe’s developed the sort of patience worthy of Saints and an insatiable hunger for the world outside, for _his_ world. The world of a boy who doesn’t look much older than her, and if she asks herself once or twice why that is, why he isn’t a burly, mean-looking old man, she’s too busy trying to catch his eyes with hers to really give the question much further thought.

They’re like bottomless wells, his eyes. She could fall into them, easily, and get covered in either gold or pitch for her trouble. 

She hasn’t yet figured out which one it’ll be.

“So how much does my mother pay you again to do this?” She asks, looking over her shoulder at where he’s sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor. Waiting. 

“Enough,” it’s followed by something that could be a chuckle, could be a pained groan.

“Huh,” Zoe replies, opening her closet to look for her knitted scarf and hat. It’s getting chilly outside and she’s not taking any chances. There’s no way in hell she’s going to risk pneumonia when freedom’s so close in reach that she can almost feel the tips of her fingers brushing it. 

“I guess it’s pretty easy money, following a girl around all day. One who can’t exactly run very far, at that.”

“I guess.”

She turns around, wraps her scarf around her neck, pulls her hat over her ears.

“You know, Kyle, you _can_ use more than two words at a time.”

“I know.”

Zoe rolls her eyes and urges him up with a gesture of her hand, fingers twitching slightly as she curls them. He pushes himself up into a standing position almost immediately, rubbing the palms of his hands over his jeans-clad thighs and straightening his back. The movement isn’t very fluent, not like it should be. It’s jerky, rusty almost. Like an antique car roaring back to life after being hidden in a garage for over twenty years. It takes a little effort. Regardless, he’s so quick to do as she asks, she thinks, as he runs fingers through his curls and goes to open the door for her.

“We’ll go to the very edge of the Northern wood today,” she tells him, announces really. He doesn’t have a say in this; it’s bad enough her mother believes she needs an escort, and while Kyle has been nothing but compliant so far, he needs to understand that she’s not interested in any (future) suggestions he may have, or having her mind changed once it’s made up.

A simple nod and what looks like the beginnings of a faint smile.

 _Huh._ Easier than she thought it would be.

“Good.” What she feels when she brushes past him can almost be described as excitement. _Giddiness_.

 

 

The cold weather transforms them into miniature fire-breathing dragons; the air’s reaction to the excess of water vapor in their breath it can’t carry. Physics, she knows, perfectly explainable, but it’s nice to pretend once in a while. That she’s anyone - _anything_ \- but a girl trapped inside a mansion, a family, her mind.

“Careful.” It’s Kyle, who rushes to place a hand on her shoulder and presses down, making her knees buckle a little. Zoe just barely ducks her head in time to avoid a thick, overhanging branch.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, the tips of her ears going red under her hat despite herself. She shouldn’t feel embarrassed –has no reason to be- he’s no better, no more important, than Moira is. Zoe’d been caught once by the maid in the bathroom, lighting matches under precious photographs of her mother and letting them burn and sizzle and crackle until by the time she was done nothing remained on the bottom of the claw-footed bathtub but a smattering of ashes. She hadn’t been embarrassed, then, even though she’d felt caught. 

“…”

The blanket of wet leaves covering the ground makes a sopping sound under their feet as they venture deeper into the wood. High above their heads, birds chirp. Zoe makes a mental note to leave more birdseed out for them to find later. It looks like they’re going to have a hard winter, and she knows the only creatures her mother cares about reside within the walls of the mansion, those of her Master bedroom first and foremost. Herself and the older gentleman who calls on her from time to time.

“Do you have any family?” It’s a stupid question, because most people do in one form or another… parents, a brother, a sister… hell, a cousin or uncle twice removed. Then again, most of those people don’t agree to move in with their employers, no matter how much they’re paid to do so.

“Oh yeah, I’ve got a big family.”

“Really? Are they local?”

“Most of them are. There are a few who live overseas, though.”

“I’ve never been overseas,” she says, unable to keep regret from seeping into her voice.

Kyle turns his head to look at her as they walk. “It’s okay. I haven’t either. I’ve never even left town.”

A beat. She looks down at the ground and kicks at a branch with the tip of her boot. “Same here.”

They’re both silent as she leads them further into the wood. She doesn’t know much, but she knows the way. Knows the trees and bushes and every winding path between –beaten or otherwise- like the back of her hand. She takes care not to let her mind wander again, to pay attention to any stray rocks or snapping branches. She doesn’t look at Kyle, either; for the most part he walks right behind her, only coming up to walk beside her when the road she chooses allows him to do so. It’s a little strange to find that she doesn’t mind his looming presence as much as she probably should. She absolutely hates the fact that she’s being supervised, but the thought of leaving her mother’s domain in the near future already gives her wings. More than that, he feels oddly familiar. Like she’s felt the eyes on her back, heard the rhythm of his footsteps, the deep in and out of the breaths he takes, all before.

When she catches sight of the iron fence looming in the distance, the one that lines the property, she slows her steps a bit.

“This is as far as we can go for now.”

“I don’t mind,” he tells her, pocketing his hands in his jeans, and keeps walking. She doesn’t.

“ _I_ do.” She hates how bratty she sounds. Petulant, like a child.

He looks back over his shoulder at her and raises a cocked brow. “Do you want to turn back?” His next step is hesitant. 

“No,” she concedes, “I want to see the lake.”

There are still geese on the water. Zoe wraps her hands around the wrought, iron bars and rests her forehead between them as she peers at the flock of birds. “They’ll disappear soon,” she tells Kyle, wistfully. “when it gets too cold, they migrate.” She sniffs, knows her nose must have turned a berry sort of red in the time it took them to walk from the mansion to the fence. “I’m surprised they’re still here, actually.”

“I’ve never seen them like this before.”

She looks over at Kyle, confusion making her brows knit together. “What do you mean?”

He licks his lips, doesn’t look at her, just straight ahead at the lake. “This calm. Quiet. Geese usually make so much noise.”

“Only when they’re in flight or feel threatened.”

“Guess so.”

It takes Zoe a second to tear her eyes away from his profile, but when she succeeds she does so with a slight shake of her head and in silence. Her fingers are going cold and so are her toes. She thinks idly of how she should have worn a thicker pair of socks, of all the different places she’ll visit when she’s allowed outside again soon, of how the color of Kyle’s hair and eyes matches the Autumn season pretty perfectly.

She thinks plenty but says nothing.

 

 

“How are you liking your new friend?” Cordelia asks a week and some change after Zoe has shown Kyle the lake. She looks up from the French textbook she has open on the arm of the sofa, props her arms –her elbows- under her and raises herself up into a kneeling position. She stretches languidly, hands balled into loose fists as she lifts them over her head.

“Friend? You mean Kyle?”

“Yes,” Cordelia answers, as she unbuttons her coat, folds it neatly over the arm she’s very nearly hugging her own waist with. “He seems very nice.”

Zoe eyes her sister, deducts from her body language and the fact that she has not yet slipped out of her heels or hung her coat away that she’s not planning on staying very long.

She shrugs, one-shouldered. “He’s okay. A little weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah. He doesn’t talk very much.”

Cordelia nods once, slowly, as if she understands, but it takes her a while to reply. “Well, mother doesn’t pay him to talk.”

Zoe frowns, because she didn’t expect that sort of answer from her.

“I know she doesn’t. You just asked me how I’m liking my new _friend_ , though,” she points out. Cordelia looks like she’s been caught, drags her teeth over her lower lip.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“…”  
“Maybe you should try to engage him more, if you want him to talk.” She looks pointedly around the empty room. Kyle’s nowhere in sight. Zoe told him she was going to study –inside, in the main living area, _just_ down the flight of stairs- and wanted to be left alone. She likes him well enough, and he sort of fascinates her in a way she doesn’t care to think about for long stretches of time, but as welcome as his company is, his penchant for silence is not. It puts her off.

“Engage him how? I’ve asked him about his hobbies before. He said he doesn’t have any.” She wrinkles her nose. “Who doesn’t have hobbies? Even _I_ have hobbies.”

She does, even if they’re tragically predictable for a girl who’s spent most of her teenage life by herself, with nowhere really to go but the next room down the hall, no one to talk to who’s not too far removed from her emotional world by age or blood. She’s an avid reader, has taught herself how to play the piano and is halfway decent at it. She excels at sketching, having decided that if she can’t go to the outside world, she can at least bring the outside world to her. The walls of her room are covered in her particular vision of distant lands. Uncharted territory.

“Find something you both enjoy doing,” her sister offers, “read a book together…discuss it. If nothing else, it will kill the time.”

“Maybe…,” Zoe hesitates, because a book club of two sounds rather boring, for one, and she can’t really picture Kyle reading, for another. He’s so stoic. “… at least until I can go out again.”

“Right.” Cordelia’s smile is gentle. 

“Is it true the doctor’s visiting again at the end of the month?”

“That’s what I heard, yes.”

_No nausea, no headaches, no throwing up since Kyle. Cross your heart and hope to die._

Zoe purses her lips and gets up from the couch, textbook forgotten as she walks up to Cordelia and flattens her skirt with her hands. “Okay. I’ll try it.”

 

 

Kyle’s not into it.

“You do remember that you’re being paid to be here, right?” It’s a dirty line, but Zoe’s at the end of her rope. She has her hands on her hips, the sunlight shining through the ceiling-high windows behind her casting a long, thin shadow on the floor’s carpet. It starts at the dainty tips of her feet and falls over Kyle’s body, his face.

He doesn’t seem impressed in the least. If anything, he only glowers at her from where he’s sitting in one of six armchairs positioned strategically throughout the library. A quiet, little reading spot harboring an angry boy. It’s the first time she’s seen him like this.

“I’m being paid to keep you company and protect you when you go outside, not to entertain you.”

Zoe’s jaw tightens because he has a point. It pisses her off; she got up early that day to carefully select her favorite books from the shelves. She’d arranged them in three neat piles on the writing desk, had already pondered which one she’d like to discuss with him first.

And now he’s being difficult about the whole thing. 

“I’m not asking you to do a fucking dance or juggle a few cups in the air,” she huffs, “I’m asking you to read a book.”

“I’ll try the cups.”

Zoe narrows her eyes at him. She knows she can’t force him to read if he really doesn’t want to, knows that just because he’s working for her mother - _for her_ \- doesn’t mean she can order him around… but she’s also used to getting her way. The price her mother pays for keeping her daughter locked inside a cage is that it has to be a golden one. It’s been a while since she’s been refused anything but the outside world.

“Why can’t you just do this one thing for me?” She’s not pleading with him: she’s angry.

“Because I don’t want to. I’ll do something else.”

“I don’t _want_ anything else.”

He doesn’t say anything in reply, just bunches his shoulders. Not budging.

Zoe knocks one of the piles off the desk with her hand, books tumbling to the floor, papers rustling. Kyle flinches briefly but remains otherwise unmoved. She wants to shake him.

“God, you’re useless!”

She storms out, leaves him to enjoy the solitude.

For three days.

 

 

She’s being awful but they made her this way.

 

 

“You’re not here to cause her distress! You’re here to protect her should she venture outside again in the future!”

The sound of her mother’s heels on the hardwood floor; Zoe can almost picture her pacing back and forth, routinely bringing her cigarette up to her lips. Fiona Goode’s a slave to no man, no woman, to _nothing_ but her addictions.

She doesn’t hear Kyle but she knows he’s there, on the receiving end of her wrath, and she almost feels sorry for him. 

“She’s a sensitive girl, she needs to be handled with care—“

Zoe doesn’t hear anything after that. She pulls the covers up over her head, clutches them hard and turns away from her bedroom door. From the world.

 

 

It doesn’t take her long to allow him in again after that. The word sensitive in her mother’s mouth might as well be a red cape waved in front of her bull-like eyes. She’s stubborn and can be just as deadly and ruthless as any beast when she wants to be. Sensitive in her mother’s mouth means weak, feeble-minded, ill… words with negative connotations she doesn’t care for. The days until the doctor visits again are being crossed on a calendar and she won’t see the date go wrong.

Kyle doesn’t need to apologize for shit – _she does_ \- but he tries his best to do so anyway and she bites her tongue in return.

It works for them.

“What do you wanna do next?” They’ve just finished their third game of Clue and Zoe’s tired of losing. She hasn’t answered him yet, is putting all of the pieces back inside the carton box when he continues. “Maybe we could go exploring?”

She snorts. Looks up at him through her lashes and smiles, indulgent. 

“Fat chance. I haven’t seen the doctor yet, remember?”

“I mean here.”

“Here? Trust me Kyle, after four years? I’ve seen everything there is to see.”

“I haven’t.”

“…”

“What? I haven’t. It’s a big house.”

Zoe lets out a sigh and slides the box to the side, extends a hand to him as she goes to stand up, slightly clammy fingers closing around his when he takes it.

“Come on. I’ll show you something.”

 _Something_ is up all the flights of stairs in the mansion plus a ladder. The attic. Her mother’s sanctuary. It takes them a while to actually reach it, because if Kyle’s movements aren’t as jerky anymore, it still takes him some effort to take all those steps up. Zoe feels something akin to shame when she realizes she’s been meaning to ask him about the at times almost rigidness of his limbs, but forgot somewhere along the way.

“Take a look at this. Crazy, right?”

Kyle’s eyes go wide when they’re met with the sight of what Zoe likes to refer to as the nest her mother uses to lay all her mad, little eggs in. There’s a large pentagram painted in red on the dusty floorboards –Moira’s not allowed up… no one is - and her mother doesn’t have time for such a menial task as sweeping the floor. Herbs in various states of drying are tied with cord to the ceiling, lining the beams that support the roof Zoe has so often felt is going to fall down on her. 

“Check it out.” She saunters over to a leather bound tome her mother has left open. It’s placed neatly on an intricately decorated altar in the middle of the attic. “Her _spellbook_.” She makes the air quotes. She can’t help it; it’s all too ridiculous for words.

Kyle’s hesitating, keeping close to the ladder. Spooked by the cabinets full of curiosities that are lining the walls, no doubt. Her mother has a fascination for all things morbid –obviously- and thanks to her father’s untimely death, more money than she knows what to do with. It’s a combination that has resulted in a pretty impressive collection over the years.

Well, impressive if you’re into fucked up.

“It’s okay, everything in here is dead except for the toads over there.” She nods to the far corner. It’s clouded in darkness. Kept humid. “Trust me, I’ve checked.”

“I don’t think we should be here.”

“You think correctly,” she agrees, “she’d kill me if she found out I was up here. With you, no less.” Her words do nothing to erase the wariness from his face. “ _If_ she found out.”

Kyle swallows, eyes glued to a jar filled to the brim with eyeballs. “If sounds good.”

Zoe lets out a laugh. “She’s not really a witch, you know. She just _thinks_ she is. I’ve got my illness and she’s got hers.” She shakes her head and trails a finger over the edge of the tome. For something so apparently old, the pages are razor sharp. She very nearly cuts herself on them.

“Ridiculous,” she mutters under her breath, and it’s almost an accusation. As if the book is the cause of her mother losing her sanity, instead of a mere result of it. She turns away from the altar and makes her way back over to Kyle. The poor guy looks like he’s seen enough. He wanted to explore, to have an adventure. She feels nothing short of satisfied that by doing something so simple as taking him up to the attic, she’s given him that and then some. He looks so freaked out, it’s almost disappointing. 

“Relax, Kyle,” she drawls, and her grin could give the faded paper a run for its money as far as sharpness is concerned, “it’s just a bunch of Hocus Pocus.”

 

 

It’s difficult to do as she’s told and keep breathing steadily in and out when her heart is beating a tattoo against the inside of her sternum. The diaphragm feels cold against her skin, a little ice cube moving gently over the small expanse of her back. A reminder that outside, it’s finally started freezing. She clutches the front of her shirt with hopeful fingers, keeping the material up by clenching her arms to her sides. Her mother’s hovering over them, never straying more than a couple feet from her bed.

She’s clutching her pearls. _Literally_. Actual pearls. Zoe would have barked out a laugh at the imagery, if she wasn’t so damn nervous. So _crazyfuckingexcited_.

“Well, doctor?” It’s her mother who speaks. “Give it to us straight. No need for bullshit.”

The doctor sighs, takes the stethoscope away. Zoe instantaneously holds her breath.

“I don’t believe she’s ready yet.”

All the air in her lungs leaves her; it makes a wailing sound as it rushes through her windpipe and past her lips.

“No, I am!” She almost whips around to face the doctor, shirt falling forlornly back down to cover her bare stomach. “I haven’t been sick in so long, _please_!”

“You heard what the doc—“

“No! Shut up!” She cries, and it’s only because they have company –important company, at that- that her mother lets her get away with her outburst. Somewhere in the back of her head Zoe realizes she’ll have to answer for her brutality later, will most likely be punished for it, but at that moment she couldn’t care less.

“Please,” she repeats, as she turns her attention –her desperation- back on the doctor. “I have been taking all of the medication you prescribed, all of the pills. I haven’t thrown up. I’ve been feeling healthy. I even have someone now to see me safely home in case I faint or have a seizure.” 

The doctor looks regretful. If there’s any doubt, though, any sign he might change his mind, she doesn’t see it. 

“One more month,” he tells her resolutely, as he gets up and starts to pack up his leather bag. “The injection I gave you will help. I want you to join the outside world again, Zoe. Your mother wants that, too.” The woman in question stays silent, no doubt still shocked from being interrupted. Zoe can’t imagine it happening very frequently, if at all. “Give it one more month, and then I will allow you to venture outside. If you really do have someone to look after you…”

“She does, doctor,” her mother interjects, with a sweetness in her voice that doesn’t suit her, “I made sure of it.”

The doctor nods, snips his bag shut and walks over to the edge of the bed, _to her_ , hand extended. Zoe’s slipped into silence somewhere between the words month and mother. Tuned out. Her eyes are watery and they decidedly look right through the man’s dress shirt. The offered hand is dropped awkwardly down again.

“Right.” Since she’s no longer acknowledging his presence, he turns to her mother. “I will see her in a month. Keep her warm in the meantime.”

 

 

She throws up violently that night, her head pounding so hard it’s almost humming. Something’s trying to crush her napes from the inside out. There’s a violent tremor in her bones she can’t seem to shake. Her hair gets in the way; it’s too long, sticks to her clammy forehead in long tresses. There’s snot running down her nose from the exertion of heaving and crying for the better part of an hour. It’s all very unglamorous. Humbling.

As she feels the cold tiles of the bathroom floor starting to take a toll on her bony knees, Zoe thinks she’s never going to get out. Never going to get better.

 

 

They try to comfort her but she won’t let them. She’s floating on an ocean, her four-poster bed a ship, the curtains her sails. The room is spinning, going blurry at the edges, and Zoe feels like burying deeper into the covers is the only thing that keeps her even remotely grounded.

Cordelia tries to bring her books. She flings them at the window, the door, her sister’s head.

Her mother tries to assuage her with promising words, pretty words, which later turn hard and impatient. _”Don’t be such a child! Get up right now!”_

She doesn’t see anyone else for however long it takes her to get past the first stage of her voluntary, self-afflicted fever dream. She makes the covers go damp with sweat, starts screaming each time her mother tries to draw the heavy curtains of her room open. When she’s no longer deterred and allows sunlight into the room with a jerk of her arms, millions upon millions of dust particles spring to life in its rays. There’s frost lining the edges of the glass. Birds are hopping the bare branches of her Oak Tree in search of food. Zoe takes to drawing the curtains around her bed closed instead.

It’s Kyle who eventually opens them again.

She’s still lethargic but the nausea’s gone. The all too familiar sickness that has been terrorizing her for years now. Zoe’s slumped against the headboard, arms crossed loosely in front of her chest and head turned sideways, though there’s nothing but curtains for her to look at.

“What do you want?” She asks. Her throat feels sore and the sound of her voice sounds foreign to her ears. It’s been a while since she’s used it for anything other than screams and cries of sadness.

He’s standing at the foot of her bed, curtains in hand. She doesn’t look at him but she can imagine the expression on his face well enough. A little confused but maddeningly patient.

“I wanted to see if you’re alright.”

“Do I look alright to you?”

“No.”

At least it’s honest. Her eyes are still puffy from crying earlier, her cheeks blotted. She hasn’t bothered to take a bath yet. You could fry food in her hair, that’s how greasy it is. So yeah, it’s safe to say she’s had better days.

“Did my mother send you?”

“Yeah.”

Again with the honesty. She turns to face him, puffs up her chest.

“But I wanted to see you, anyway.”

“…”

“I did.”

“…”

He licks his lips, nervous, and looks lost. Like a little bird, fallen from the nest and left to its own devices by its parents. It’s painfully clear he’s far outside of his comfort zone.

“Right. I’ll just…” he goes to draw the curtains shut again.

“They’re never going to let me out, you know. _She_ ’s not.” 

He pauses.

“The doctor said—“

“I know what he said!” She snaps, fingers digging into the flesh of her arm hard enough to leave little white marks in their wake. “He’s a liar. Do you know how many times he’s told me before to just wait one more week, one more month? Weeks turn into months turn into years, Kyle. Four of them.”

His shoulders drop and she doesn’t like the way he looks at her. With pity in his eyes.

“Stop.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

She gives him a knowing look and he shuts up, straightens his back a little. He’s towering over the mattress, which is pretty impressive because it’s a very large bed and she doesn’t think he’s actually all that tall. He’s just one of those people who demand space in a room, she supposes. Hard not to notice them or take your eyes off their frame once you have.

“Just come downstairs. Your mother’s out.”

She ignores him.

“I just feel like I’m going to be stuck here forever.”

“So, what? You’re going to lock yourself up inside your room? Make your world even smaller?”

He says it carefully, but Zoe narrows her eyes at him anyway. She feels like throwing a pillow at his stupid face. Wishes she had something heavier in reach.

“I don’t want to upset you it’s just…” he runs a hand through his curls, “I don’t really know what to do when you’re not around. Your mother didn’t hire me to sit around all day.”

“She’s out now?”

He nods. “Yeah.”

She sighs and flings the covers off her body. If he lets his eyes roam over her exposed legs, only to avert them quickly when she throws them over the edge and plants her feet on the carpet, toes digging in, she’s still too sullen to care about her modesty or propriety.

“Fine. I’ll play the piano for you. Let me take a bath first, though; I reek.”

He doesn’t argue, just nods and lingers near the bed for a moment before he realizes what she’s just said and makes a quick and quiet exit.

 

 

“You’re really missing out, you know.”

“I don’t think so.”

Two days before the doctor visits again. Even though the library still seems to make Kyle uncomfortable and he’s yet to pick up a book, they spend a significant amount of time in there. Together.

Zoe knows Cordelia approves; rather than getting angry, she smiles at her whenever she rushes through an assignment lately. She also knows her mother isn’t of the same mind. She hovers, sometimes, checking up on what they’re doing. At the table, she doesn’t really speak to Kyle, barely even acknowledges his presence. She _tolerates_ him, but that’s about it.

All it does is make Zoe want to be even closer to him.

“No, seriously, listen to this.”

She rolls over onto her belly and casts a look up at Kyle. He’s dragged an armchair up to the window and is staring out at the garden, hands resting in his lap, his blond locks catching the last dying light of the day. She’s on the floor in front of the fire place. A picture perfect scenario, if it hadn’t been for the forlorn look on his face and the invisible ball and chain around her ankle.

“You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all.” 

Outside, it starts to snow again. Miniature clouds of fluffy crystalized water. They come by the thousands, have been putting the country under siege for well over a week now. Ice moves fast and like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and has a taste for murder.

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you.” Zoe glances at Kyle to make sure he’s paying attention. He is. 

“Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.”

Kyle shifts in his seat, tugs at the sleeve of his sweater. His hands, like the rest of him, are big somehow. Weathered. They look rough, like he’s been doing intense manual labor out on some field for months, instead of trailing behind a spoiled girl in a mansion. 

“Do you think something’s shifting inside you?”

“I hope it is,” she replies instantly, her own dainty fingers stroking the page of her book, furling the edge of it. “I hate the place I’m in right now…” she swallows, “I hate the way I am.”

“I don’t,” he offers softly, and tears his black eyes away from her again before she can follow up the sudden way her jaw goes slack with a reply, turns them back on the garden, the trees of the Northern wood in the distance.

Zoe’s heart skips a beat. Her bones suddenly feel too heavy. They drag her down, make her melt slowly into the plush carpet.

 

 

The heavy gate separating the vast property that over the years has grown too small to contain her, too familiar to satisfy her sense of wonder and curiosity, creaks dangerously when Kyle pushes it open. He struggles with it, as if the damned thing is pushing back. Unyielding iron versus strong arms. Right before he manages to get it open enough for a person to go through, it almost screams, the hinges protesting her newfound freedom.

 _Freedom_.

Zoe’s shivering with excitement, her limbs tense and eyes expectant. She feels a strange stillness inside of her that doesn’t match the way her heart is hammering in her chest. She’s waited so long for this moment, now that it’s finally here she’s almost afraid to grab hold of it and make it hers. She can feel her mother’s eyes burning holes in her back, even though she and Kyle have long since disappeared from sight; the mansion is so far removed from the front gate, it’d be impossible for her to see them even through the window in the attic. Her witches den. 

She’d wanted to come with, of course, but Zoe had thrown her a look so foul it had, for once, stopped her in her tracks.

Kyle grunts, pushes hard, and the gate finally surrenders, opens all the way.

The gravel makes a crisp sound under the soles of her laced up boots as she walks forward. It’s like music to her ears.

“Holy shit,” she breathes, looking up at the sky. It’s completely white, an endless blank canvas that matches the one beneath her feet perfectly. The thick scarf around her neck and her wide brimmed hat can’t prevent her cheeks and nose from growing cold and she can’t believe she’s actually _feeling_ it. Feeling the cold outside, rather than in her own little wonderland prison, and if it’s the same exact cold, she doesn’t care. To her it isn’t.

“I’m out!” She spins around to look back at Kyle and realizes she’s only five steps removed from the gate. They’re five incredibly important steps, though.

“You are,” he agrees with a smile, rubbing his hands together because even though they’re both dressed for winter, they stupidly forgot gloves. “Ready to go see the lake?”

She eyes the white skates around his neck and her whole face lights up when she smiles back.

“ _So_ ready.”

 

 

She’s flying.

The blades of her skates are etching swirls and lines into the milky white ice. _Skitch shhhhhh, skitch shhhhhhhh_. Like smoothly dragging the point of a knife over glass. Zoe’s eyes are going teary and the cold wind bites at her nose and ears, but her chest feels like it’s going to burst at any given moment. 

Kyle’s sitting on the edge of the lake, his boots on the ice and elbows on his knees, arms hanging loosely between them. He laughs when she whooshes past him, strands of dark brown hair flying after her, getting in her face when she glides into a sudden stop and turns her body around to face him. 

“Are you freezing your ass off yet?” She’s been skating for what? Half an hour?

“Starting to feel like it, yeah.” He squints up at her and raises a hand to shield his eyes from the rays of sunlight that are managing to break through the canopy of clouds. She’s pleased to see that the corners of his mouth are turned up.

“Maybe you should get up here, then.”

“I don’t have any skates.”

“I can see that.” She cocks a brow, gives him a grin. “You should still get up here. Come on, I’ll help.”

When she gracefully crosses the short distance between them and extends both of her hands, a flicker of doubt crosses over Kyle’s face, makes his nose crinkle and Addams apple bob. Zoe chuckles, wobbles a little when she bends down to grab his hands.

“It’s okay. Nice and easy.”

She draws him up on the ice with her. It’s clear that he doesn’t trust the way it feels under his boots, just as hard as the frozen ground but infinitely more slippery. He’s careful when he attempts a step forward, and she can feel his fingers clench around hers as he slides his foot towards her.

“I don’t like this,” he tells her, matter-of-fact. His eyes are fixed on his feet. Another step.

“Don’t be a baby. You’re doing great.”

Kyle lets out a doubtful noise, something between a groan and a whine, coming from deep inside his throat.

She gets him halfway to the middle of the lake, anyway, because if there’s one thing Zoe has learned in the time she’s known Kyle it’s that –apart from reading books- he’ll do pretty much anything to please her. The knowledge makes her feel giddy inside, comfortably warm despite the winter chill. Safe.

He doesn’t let go of her. If anything, he moves even closer, placing his hands on her shoulders as the air between them turns into a smoke-like swirl of mingling breath. Looking at him so closely makes her feel a little light-headed, and it throws her so much that she almost hopes it’s her illness striking again, rather than the strong line of his jaw and the freckle on the tip of his nose.

“You’re steady on your feet for someone who hasn’t skated in a while.”

Zoe smiles and looks down between them.

“I’ve dreamt about it enough. More times than I can count. I guess it’s like riding a bike, you know? Once you’ve learned how, all it takes is getting on one to remember.”

“I guess. No one’s ever taught me.”

“No one’s ever taught you how to ride a bike?” She snorts, incredulous.

“No.” The look in his eyes when they meet hers combined with the way he says it makes her sober up quickly.

“That’s kind of sad.”

Kyle shrugs. “I know how to do other things.”

“Yeah? Like what?” 

He gives her a boyish, lopsided grin and takes her bare hands in his.

“My hands are cold.” It’s possibly the most stupidly unnecessary thing she’s ever said.

“I know.”

He doesn’t seem bothered, just draws them up to his face. His chapped lips brush over the side of her fingers, so soft and brief that she might have dreamt his touch had she not been so startlingly and suddenly awake, aware of every little detail. 

His eyes are like Medusa’s. She’s transfixed by them, frozen in place much like the Greek heroes of old who crossed the Gorgon’s path. Doomed.

Her fingers tingle slightly as they’re made instantly warmer by his breath. He’s blowing on them, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips. Zoe opens her mouth but says nothing. Can’t.

“There,” he says when he’s done, when he’s effectively chased away the bite of winter from her flesh and bones. Her heart. Zoe swallows the lump that has started to form in her throat and gives him a weak, watery smile.

“Thanks.”

Kyle’s cheeks dimple when he gives her a smile of his own and rather than letting go of her hands again, pulls them into the holes of his jacket, his sweater. For someone who’s not dressed as warmly as she is, his body radiates heat like a furnace. Zoe sighs, puts fingers around his lower arms. They’re firm, like she expected them to be.

“That’s really nice.”

He cocks his head at her. There are curls falling into his eyes.

“If you’re getting too cold, we should probably go back.”

“No!” The word rushes past her lips. “Just… just a little while longer, please.”

He hesitates. “Are you sure? Your mother…”

Her mother will kill Kyle if she gets sick or they stay gone too long, and probably her with him, she knows. Especially because she didn’t really want them to leave the property in the first place. Easier to make a corpse stay put than a teenage girl.

“Don’t worry about her.”

“It’s kinda hard not to.”

Inside the sleeves of his sweater, her fingers tighten around his arms. “I’ll trade kisses for minutes.”

Because she wants to shackle the hands of time and make the moment of freedom last. Because she’s been curious about _this_ too, whatever it is. More than anything else. Raging teenage hormones, sexuality, love. Because she’s fairly sure it would piss off her mother and she wants to know what it feels like to be a rebel at least once in her life. 

Because his lips have been tempting her for a while now and she’s read once that the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Kyle’s eyes open a little wider and so does his mouth, but his is not the shocked expression –the jaw dropping bewilderment- she was expecting and sort of hoping for. Zoe inhales deeply, her breath shuddering a little on the exhale, and waits.

“Okay.”

She arches a brow at him –can’t help herself, really- because there’s nothing of the sheer nervousness _she’s_ feeling in the way he says it at all. But then he’s leaning in to collect, and her mind goes completely blank. Her heart takes over. 

It’s not her first kiss, not technically, but it’s the first one that makes liquid fire rush through her veins. Kyle kisses the same way he looks at her when she feels the walls closing in, the same way he very nearly stands at attention whenever her mother waltzes into the room: strong, calm, grounded.

There’s nothing of the clumsiness she’d come to associate with kissing, or the awkward, wandering hands. Just lips, slick with spit and dragging over hers a little when he pulls away only to descend on her mouth again and be placed slightly more to the left or the right. The push and pull, the pressure, makes it easy for Zoe to melt against him. When she feels the tip of his tongue press against the seam of her lips, begging entrance, she surrenders willingly.

Wind and snow particles whip around them, the coldness tearing at their exposed cheeks, but she doesn’t care; his lips are warm.

 

 

 _She knows_.

Zoe doesn’t have the slightest clue how it happened –how it is even possible- but her mother knows.

At dinner, she keeps her eyes on her plate. Eats quietly and without protest, even though Moira’s cooked Brussels sprouts and the mere smell of them makes her want to gag. Kyle’s quiet, too, at the other side of the table. He pushes his vegetables around a little on his plate before he eats them, but eat them he does.

They don’t talk. They don’t play footsie under the table. They barely even look at each other, even though Zoe finds it almost unbearably hard not to. 

Perhaps it’s that eagerness, that longing even when she’s focusing on her dinner, that’s showing on her face and giving her away, because her mother turns to her and…

“My, you’re glowing.”

Zoe looks up at her, doesn’t take her eyes off her mother’s face as she takes another bite, and she acts about a million times calmer than she’s feeling.

“I went outside today. Of course I’m glowing.”

“Nooo,” her mother draws out the word, flashes a little smile that makes Zoe want to scream because it’s so _knowing_ and clearly meant to make her squirm on her chair, “that’s not it.”

Zoe clenches her jaw. Her heart’s hammering inside her chest.

“What else would it be?”

Her mother says nothing, though Zoe swears she sees the arch of her brow twitch ever so slightly before she turns back to her food.

“Good grief, this tastes like something the cat hacked up. Moira!”

For the first time since they sat down for dinner, Zoe chances a look at Kyle. At his face, not just his hands. He glances up from his plate almost immediately, as if he’s able to feel her eyes on him. Has trained himself to.

Zoe knows that her mother knows, but in that very moment she also becomes painfully aware of the fact that she’s not going to give him up. No way, no how. She’s the one who brought him into her life; she can’t very well blame her for digging her nails in and holding on to him now.

As Moira walks into the room, pristinely white towel in hand, Zoe extends her leg under the table and aligns the sides of their feet.

He doesn’t pull away.

 

 

Despite all the disapproval and discontent that seems to drip from her mother, slow and steady like resin down a tree, they venture out more. Zoe teaches Kyle how to ride a bike, which is no small feat considering the weather and the size of him compared to her own small frame. It takes some effort and a lot of snow shoveling but they manage.

“Don’t go so fast!” She’s peddling after him, breathless. Her lungs hurt as much as her cheeks do. She’s smiling so wide. Laughing.

Kyle predictably loses his balance when he tries to look back over his shoulder at her, and steers himself right into a snow bank.

“Kyle!”

She doesn’t bother to actually put on the brakes, just hops off and leaves her bike to land where it falls. She pushes a strand of hair back behind her ear as she carefully approaches him, crouches down so she can see the damage up close and personal.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

He’s fine, just pulls his leg out from under his bike as if nothing happened and hoists himself up into a sitting position. There’s snow sticking in his hair and to the side of his face.

Zoe bites her lip to keep from grinning.

“Nice going,” she teases.

Kyle shrugs good-naturedly and reaches for her, tugs at the cinched belt around her waist, and it’s her turn to lose her balance as she falls into his arms. He rubs his nose against hers and it’s such a ridiculously tender and sweet gesture, Zoe feels like she needs to suck his lower lip between hers just to balance things out. So she does, and he lets her, whimpering slightly when she introduces her teeth to the mix only seconds in. She drags them over the inside, gnaws at his lips a little and coaxes his tongue out. It’s sloppy, intense.

Tender and sweet aren’t for her.

 

 

Hands under sweaters and fingers on heated skin.

Stolen touches in the library, the hallway, against a tree in the Northern wood, against _her_ tree. Far removed from prying eyes, the freckles of which would align perfectly with her own, because they’re more alike than Zoe would ever care to admit.

She craves the taste of him like an addict and takes her kisses from him like she’s getting her fix.

 

 

Whoever first came up with the phrase “nothing good can last” was a major cunt and also completely and utterly right.

She’s sick again. Violently so.

Cordelia only leaves her bedside to get fresh towels. Kyle bites the nail of his thumb and wants to help but mostly just gets in the way. Her mother’s nowhere to be seen. 

She works up a fever high enough that it makes her hallucinate. It seems to burn through her, makes her stick to the thin blankets Cordelia keeps covering her with, in spite of her weak protests. She wants them off, wants the windows open so the wind is free to sweep snow inside her bedroom.

There are carrion birds instead. They shatter the glass, make it explode into a million sharp grains of salt that pop and ping as they bounce off the walls. Somehow they get under her door, too. Their beaks are smeared in blood and the noise they make is unbearable. Zoe tries to cover her ears with her hands, but she can’t move. There are thorny vines protruding from her mattress and coiling around her limbs like boa constrictors.

She opens her mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. She’s mute, soon to be blind because there are birds landing on either side of her pillow, waiting for the light in her eyes to dim so they can pick them out of her skull.

Her mother appears at the end of her bed, dressed all in white. This is how she knows that she’s ailing, dreaming even though her heart is beating inside her chest at the speed of a colibri’s wings and she can feel her insides curl into knots. It all _feels_ startlingly real but it’s not, none of it is; her mother would never wear any other color than black.

“Zoe.”

She’s never heard anyone spit out her name like that, like she’s something foul and bitter tasting.

Again, she opens her mouth to speak but it’s useless. Tears start to well in the corners of her eyes.

“Zoe… Zoe!”

When she opens them, it’s Cordelia she sees. She’s hovering over her, a cool hand placed on her forehead. There’s no mistaking the way her brows are furrowed together and her eyes widen. She’s worried.

“Hey,” she croaks and smiles weakly in an attempt to comfort her. She looks over her sister’s shoulder. Kyle’s standing right behind her. She smiles at him too, or at least makes a valiant effort to.

Cordelia doesn’t say anything, just strokes her hair.

“The doctor will be here soon.”

It’s her mother’s voice. Zoe sees her come into the room out of the corner of her eye.

“No!” She wants to shout but the word’s barely a whisper.

Cordelia bows her head and looks away. There’s tension around her mouth and in her shoulders.

“He’ll fix this. Just you wait.”

 

 

He fixes it, alright. Of course he does.

He fixes it by pumping her full of medicine and putting an end to her little trips with Kyle.

No amount of glowering, screaming, protesting or crying helps to change her mother’s mind about the strict orders. Not that she ever really expected it would, but it’s nice just to get the frustration –the helplessness- off her chest.

 

 

“Look!”

Zoe glances up at Kyle. She’s perched on the edge of her bed, hair swept to one side so she can make a fishtail braid, or attempt to, anyway. Only half way through and she’s already losing her patience; her hair’s too shiny and the strands keep sliding through her fingers.

Kyle’s juggling three cups in the air, his eyes fixed on the fragile China.

“You’re actually doing it!” Zoe chuckles, though the wide smile she gives him doesn’t quite reach her eyes. Her mood, like the weather, has been getting progressively worse. Too long she’s been cooped up inside again. She never thought she’d be able to forget four years in captivity, but somewhere along the way she had. It was strange, just how quickly she’d taken the outside world –being able to be part of it, at least in some ways- for granted again.

Kyle catches the cups –two in his right hand and one in his left, though all three could have easily fitted in one of his palms- and beams at her. Zoe lets the braid slip from her hands and bites her lip. She appreciates his efforts to cheer her up, to offer her a distraction, however brief, from the situation she’s in, but it isn’t enough.

She wants to feel the way she did that day they went ice skating, or the morning they rode their bikes to the local market. 

She just wants to feel _something_. Anything but this endless tristesse. 

“Come here.”

She holds her hand out for him to take, reaches for him the same way she’s done countless times before and just like each and every single one of those times, he comes. Willingly and eagerly; the cups can’t be placed aside quickly enough.

From the way he looks at her as he approaches, it’s obvious that he thinks he knows what she wants.

He’s wrong.

Her hands find his shirt once he’s close enough and tug him towards her, until he’s standing right between her spread legs with his knees pressed against the mattress. There’s adoration in her eyes when they meet his, but mostly there’s lust. Smoldering like hot coals behind her irises. 

She doesn’t take them off Kyle’s face as she slips both of her hands under the worn fabric of his shirt and starts the slow ascend of her palms on his skin. His abdominal muscles instantly tighten and flex, and she thinks she can hear him let out a soft, shuddery sigh.

“I want you to do something for me.” Her voice is slow like molasses, a lot more steady than the beat of her heart.

His lips part slightly and she sees him swallow, interrupts before he can say anything.

“You don’t have to read. Actually, it’s something _I_ read.” She doesn’t even realize she’s dragging her teeth over her lower lip. “Can you—I want you to get on your knees.”

Kyle raises his brows and his eyes shine with something she can’t quite place. Mischief, perhaps… definitely interest.

“That’s it? Just that?” She feels like he’s teasing her and it makes her bolder, because she’s the one who’s calling the shots, or she’s supposed to be anyway.

“I want you to get on your knees and kiss me.”

“You want me to get on my knees and go down on you,” he corrects.

She drags her nails over his skin to mask the way her fingers tremble, but she can’t hide the sudden flushing of her cheeks. She doesn’t know why she’s surprised by the fact that he’s taking initiative –he’d been the first to lean in that faithful day on the lake, after all, and had clearly known what he was doing too- but she is a little.

“I…”

“What book did you read that in?” He asks, giving her a crooked smile but his voice is significantly lower than it was seconds before.

“I thought you didn’t want anything to do with books.”

“Fair enough.”

He goes down carefully, letting his hands run over the top of her thighs, her stockings. Zoe sucks at her teeth and feels her hands go surprisingly clammy now that they can no longer rely on the flat expanse of his belly and chest to keep them steady. Kyle picks up on it before the tips of his fingers reach the hem of her skirt.

“It’s okay… I want to.”

She didn’t realize consent was an issue before he brings it up, because if the butterflies he’s been giving her are more like ravenous bats in intensity, he’s still employed by her mother. He’s still there to protect and look after her and she highly doubts this was what Fiona had in mind when she gave him the job. 

She wants to call the shots, but she doesn’t want to be in a position of true power.

“I really, really want to,” he breathes, and pushes her skirt up until it gets caught around her waist, hooks his fingers in her stockings next and drags them all the way down her legs. She needs to lay back on the bed in order for him to do so and while the nerves rushing through her system are almost enough to kill her, the only thing she’s ever anticipated more was her freedom.

Zoe doesn’t look down at him, just keeps her eyes firmly fixed on the ceiling above her. She focuses on a handful of glow in the dark stars she put up there when she was little, with a little help from Cordelia. They’re the only things keeping her grounded when she feels his lips ghost over her sex, his hand gently drawing her right leg over his shoulder to give him more room.

She’s touched herself before – of course she has- without shame and often, but the tip of his nose brushing through the small tuft of hair makes her feel as if it’s the first time. As if she’s only just now become aware of the fact that she has a cunt, that it gets wet and hungry for friction. That it’s a gateway to paradise when touched just right.

Kyle knows how to touch her. It’s scary, but he does.

She feels his tongue, warm and wet and surprisingly firm bear down on her and her toes curl already –pathetically because he hasn’t really done much of anything yet but _God_.

“Hm,” she utters softly, the tension inside her body subsiding a little as he repeats the motion, moans against her slit in kind and it’s all just a slippery slope downhill after that.

When Zoe comes eventually, it’s with both of her arms above her head, one of her hands flat against her headboard, pushing at it. When she comes eventually, she’s way too loud and her legs tense around his head, shake with the intensity of her orgasm.

When she comes eventually, it’s with her eyes cinched shut and the image of him burning on the back of her lids.

It’s nothing compared to the way he looks when she comes back down to earth and musters up the courage to raise her head a little and look down between her legs. His lips and chin are slick with her come, with his spit. His hair’s damp and sticking to his forehead and he’s _grinning_ , is looking at her like she’s the center of his world.

Maybe she is, but he’s the one who keeps hers spinning.

 

 

She gets so caught up in Kyle the following weeks, that she doesn’t notice. She doesn’t notice the worried look that slowly seems to engrave itself on Cordelia’s face, or the way her mother retreats to her room more and more often.

She doesn’t notice until she walks in on the both of them almost by accident. They’re sitting across from each other, each on their own thousand dollar sofa and not saying a word. Her sister has one of her hands over her mouth and is looking out the window. Her mother’s nursing what looks to be an alcoholic drink. She’s slumping, legs laid out in front of her; Zoe’s never seen her do that before.

When she notices her standing there in the doorway, she snorts almost inaudibly and gives her a rueful, little smile. “You’re killing me, kid.” 

It’s not meant to be funny, not meant to be a joke. It’s the most hurtful thing she’s ever thrown at her head, and there have been many harsh words said on just as many occasions. Zoe combats the way her lower lip shivers for a split second by grinding her teeth together.

She doesn’t know the context, but she doesn’t need any. Is sure that it’s just another one of her mother’s crazy illusions. Ideas.

“Not fast enough.”

Cordelia whips her head around to face her at that, shocked, but Zoe’s gone before she can say anything. The sound of her mother’s laughter haunts her all the way up the stairs.

 

 

Ravel filters through the walls. Downstairs, her mother is drowning herself in despair and brandy but Zoe… Zoe has never felt more alive.

  
_O joie de mon âme_

The dim candle light throws shadows over his bare torso, his face, transforms him into something terrifyingly beautiful or beautifully terrifying. Her bodyguard, her lover, _her first_. Zoe shivers as she kneels up on the bed and draws her nightgown over her head. A sudden shyness overcomes her, unexpected and unbidden, because her body is just that: _hers_. Not too skinny or too small or too plain, and she has shared it with him before.

This is different, though. This feels infinitely more important.

_Joie de mon cœur_

She blushes and looks down, the tresses of her dark blonde hair falling forward and aiding the shadows in her attempt to hide her face from him. Kyle is having none of it, however; he reaches for her chin and tilts it up, looks right through her and into her soul when their eyes meet. Zoe lets out a small sigh and goose pimples appear on her pale skin, her nipples pebble.

_Trésor qui m'est si cher_

Kyle leans in to kiss her, reaches down to take both of her hands in his and places them on his body. He’s firm to the touch, solid, and Zoe lets her fingers roam, trails them over his chest, his shoulders, his biceps. She likes how her touch leaves his muscles clenching in its wake, because her own belly is sucked in, tight as a coiled spring where he’s touching her.

He slips his tongue into her mouth and she loses herself, isn’t even mad or scared about it.

_Joie de l'âme et du cœur_

He pushes her down on the mattress and they try to find an understanding, searching for some middle ground between the last of her reservations and his complete willingness. The sheer weight of his body on hers makes her whimper, and she hitches on leg up around his waist, her heel bearing down against the curve of his ass.

_Toi que j'aime ardemment ___

Kyle reaches down between their bodies to guide himself inside of her, rubs the head of his cock back and forth once over the part of her that’s wet for him, that aches, before he pushes all the way in. Zoe gasps and arches her back, feels like she’s drowning, leaves finger-shaped marks on the broad expanse of his back and buries her face in the crook of his neck because she doesn’t think she’ll survive if she looks into his eyes.

_Tu es plus beau, plus beau qu'un ange._

There’s no space left between them, between their slick skin, not even a breath, and it’s more meaningful a conversation than any she’s had before, without so much as a single word being said. All she needs are Kyle’s muffled groans against her temple, into her hair, the way his hips rock into hers, the sound her headboard makes as it bangs against the wall. The want and desire and desperation behind his thrusts.

She doesn’t need to look at the ceiling in order to see stars that night.

 

 

Asleep, Kyle looks ethereal in the moonlight, otherworldly. In the early morning sun he's even more beautiful, light catching on the sharp angles of his shoulder blades, turning the curves and twists of his body soft, gentle, his skin warm beneath Zoe’s open palms. She lets her hands roam over his body, over every part of him. She works her way down his nape and shoulder blades, lets her fingers dance over the dip of his spine and squeeze his ass. Waits.

When he turns in his slumber, she repeats the process with his front. Drags gentle fingers down the hollow of his throat, around his nipples, down the downy trail of hair running along his lower abdomen. She fondles his flaccid cock before she sits up, letting the sheet fall down her naked body as she does so, and moves her hand down his legs. She bends to press a soft kiss on each of his knee caps and works her way up his left leg, nuzzles at the crease of his thigh, sucks gently at his hipbone. Directs her attention to his balls, cups them as she runs the flat of his tongue over the thick vein that runs along the underside of his cock. Tries to be delicate when she wraps her lips around the head, but eagerness makes her sloppy.

He wakes quickly after that.

 

 

The sun is bearing down on what little remains of the heavy snow winter brought with it. It’s dripping from the branches in thick drops and small streams, resulting in a steady and relaxing noise, a natural beat. If she closes her eyes, Zoe can imagine herself standing in the middle of a rainforest, surrounded by exotic plants and vibrant colors, by heat and untamed life.

She isn’t, though. 

She’s standing on the edge of the terrace, her heels inside the house and her toes just out of it. Cordelia threw open the doors earlier - _“To let in some air, the winds of change”_ \- and Zoe instantly took to them like a moth to a flame, claimed the space for her and Kyle alone.

Kyle…

The sheer, white curtains in the doorway are blowing gently in the winter breeze, at times falling in front of her face like a wedding veil. She steps into them, lets them cover her skin, kiss the tip of her nose and her lips as she tilts her chin slightly up.

He’s watching her. Even through the curtain, she can see the blond shock of his hair against the winter paleness and the bright green of a spring waiting to be born. He’s throwing seeds and dried berries for the birds, some of the last they will get this season. Once when she was little, she’d asked her mother why they couldn’t just feed them year round. The answer had been that if they did, they’d grow lazy and too plentiful. Typical for her.

_Survival of the fittest._

She spreads her arms and wraps them around the curtain, brings both of her hands up to her chest in a pose similar to the ones she’d seen the old statues in the graveyard in. The weeping women and guardian angels. 

Kyle drops the last of the berries from his hand and walks over to her, seeks out the shape of her face with his fingers. Her eyes close and so do his; they don’t need them. Not for this.

Before he tilts his head down, before his lips descend on hers through the curtain –her makeshift veil- warm and familiar, she whispers three little words. _The_ words.

“I love you.”

 

 

She doesn’t get sick again. On the contrary, she starts to glow with radiant health. Feels stronger than she ever has before. More joyful and alive. 

Before long, the day comes she and Kyle inevitably make the long walk up to the gate again. Doctor’s orders: get some fresh air. When she looks up over her shoulder at the window of the attic, she thinks she sees movement behind the curtain. Just a brief glimmer and then it’s gone. 

 

 

Her mother’s death falls on a Wednesday. 

Cordelia informs her after she and Kyle return from town, immediately tells her it’s better that she doesn’t see the body when she asks about it; better to remember her the way she was in life instead of in death. It’s overwhelming just how easily Fiona slipped through the cracks… how easy any signs of her impending demise had been to ignore during those last few weeks. Zoe always imagined her mother would go kicking and screaming, if she ever would. Not _quietly_ , as if she was never even there.

How could someone like Fiona Goode simply fade away?

She feels like she should want to cry, should want to seek comfort in the arm Kyle wraps around her and the soft words he whispers against the shell of her ear. Like the ground of the Northern wood and her windows during her last winter in captivity, however, her heart is frozen. She feels the indifference her mother would have applauded her for had she still been around. The strength of the Goode women she’s never been able to grasp until now.

Arrangements need to be made. _Are_ made. 

They put her soul to rest, or what’s left of it. Her mother is buried in sand and her sister in paperwork, at least for a while. Neither one of them wants the mansion; Zoe because it holds too many memories, Cordelia because it doesn’t hold enough. So all the rooms are cleared, and the attic with it or so Zoe assumes –she hasn’t gone back up there, doesn’t feel the need to- and Kyle opens the gate for her for the very last time.

She turns as he closes it behind their backs, tells him to give her a minute and stays rooted in place as Cordelia waits in the car for them.  
A beat, as she looks at her makeshift prison, her golden cage, one last time.

“I’m out, you’re in.”

 

 

**_Epilogue_ **

She walks through the Northern wood one last time, after her children are grown and their children. Her feet still know the way, remember all the paths –beaten or not- and guide her effortlessly to the front of the mansion, to the garden where her tree stands. Abandoned now, after the last owners died more than ten years ago.

Though anyone will say it’s impossible, like her it has shrunk. Its branches bending heavily under the weight of its leaves. Memories come flooding back, of the winters she spent in captivity and the one that changed everything. That brought her Kyle. That took her mother.

Her mother…

She’s convinced in the last years of her life even more than she was in the first of it, that Fiona somehow found a way to poison her. That for whatever reason, she intentionally bound her to the mansion, kept her from the outside world. Cordelia never spoke a word about it, never confirmed or denied her suspicions. She took that secret to her grave, if it was ever hers to have. Possibly their mother had worked alone, like she’d lived the better part of her life. With insanity as her sole companion. Eyeballs and toads in the dark.

_You had your madness, but you failed to make it mine._

She walks up to the tree, runs a wrinkled hand over the bark. When she looks up at its crown, she thinks she sees a curtain move out of the corner of her eye, behind the glass of the highest window. Her fingers trail down the trunk of the tree, find the scars her mother’s axe left there so long ago.

The same as those on Kyle’s back.

-FIN- 


End file.
